They are three Indiana towns where “you pretty much know your neighbors,” an official says. Residents say they are family-oriented communities where people work with each other. They also work to help each other, and volunteerism is a mainstay of life.
Whether delivering meals to shut-ins, cleaning up a park, conducting museum tours, selling crafts made by seniors, leading a support group for care-givers of dementia patients or tutoring in the schools, volunteers are on the scene to make life better.
A volunteer sums it up: ” I believe people want the best for our community.”
Among residents and officials of Munster, Highland and Griffith there is a consensus: The three towns provide the best of two worlds.
“People are attracted to this area because you’re close enough to enjoy the big city flavor of Chicago yet removed enough to be in a rural setting,” says John Hluska, this year’s president of the Munster Town Council.
“This is the sort of place where you pretty much know your neighbors,” says Larry Wolendowski, president of the Highland Town Council. “We’re a suburb of Chicago, but we’re not a big enough place where you’re lost in the crowd.”
“There’s less hustle and bustle here than what you find in many other Chicago suburbs,” says Stan Dobosz, president of Griffith Town Council. “We’re a very quiet community. Yet, we’re not that far from the big city.”
Residents and business owners agree.
“There is rapid urbanization all around us, and this is a little jewel of a community thanks to its rural nature,” says Donna Gonzalez, 47, of Griffith. “It’s one that people really enjoy living in, and they do everything they can to keep it a nice place.”
To do her share, Gonzalez spends several days each month volunteering at the Native Plant Nursery at the Oak Ridge Prairie County Park in Griffith. There, she has helped pull weeds, burn off parts of the prairie, plant flowers and harvest grass seeds.
“I like the idea that I’m making Griffith a better place to live,” she says. “That’s important to me.”
“I believe what sort of preserves the small town atmosphere of this place is its family orientation,” says Valerie Sudbury of Munster, the co-owner of Mom’s Taxi, which shuttles children around the three communities.
“Because people work with each other and do a lot of things for their kids, this is sort of a self-contained community, despite being minutes away from Chicago,” adds Sudbury, who started her business 2 1/2 years ago.
“It’s a place where people make the extra effort to keep things close-knit.”
“When we first married 41 years ago, if a car came down Kleinman Avenue, everyone turned and looked from their front yards–it was that small a town,” says Tom Mathis, 60, a lifelong Highland resident. He and his wife, Cille, 58, own the Lamprecht Florist and Greenhouse at 8941 Kleinman Ave.
“Now, of course, there are a lot more people here . . . but it’s still a close-knit, family-oriented community,” adds Mathis, whose son Michael, 31, works with the business. “You don’t know everyone in town, but you know a lot of people.”
Families tend to remain in the communities for generations, he says: “There’s a lot in the way of roots here.”
For example, the business, which was opened in 1923 by Cille Mathis’ grandparents, Charles and Hattie Lamprecht, has been operating in the same location since then.
Mathis and his wife live a few feet south of the flower shop, and their son, Michael, and his family live in a house on the other side.
The Mathises’ daughter, Lee Ann Biesen, and her family live next door to Mathis.
“There is a lot of family here,” Dobosz says. “Three of the five new town council members are second generation.”
The community is family oriented, and people do a great deal for each other, says Barbara Meeker, 66, of Munster. “They tend to recognize that those efforts add much to the charm of our town.”
For 40 years, she has volunteered with the Munster-based Northern Indiana Arts Association. She has served as a board member, taught art classes and, in recent years, started a rental and sales gallery in which regional artists can show work.
“I believe people want the best for our community,” she says, “and they’ll do much to add to its charm.”
History is a factor in the town identities, people say.
The first European travelers and traders came through what are now Munster, Highland and Griffith along a Native American foot trail. That trail, which rose above the mostly swampy wetlands, is now Ridge Road.
The first business, a small tavern and inn at Ridge Road and Columbia Avenue in what is now Munster, opened in 1845. It served people traveling between Chicago and Detroit.
By the 1860s, the area was becoming populated with Europeans who came to farm the rich soil. These settlers dug ditches to drain the wetlands and turn the marshes into fertile farmlands.
Griffith is believed to have been named by a Grand Trunk Railroad employee who surveyed the area.
Highland was first called Clough Post Station. In 1882, Chicago and Atlantic Railroad employees, surveying the area named it Highlands. The next year, residents starting calling it by its current name.
Dutch farmers, such as the Eldert Monster family, settled in Munster in the late 1800s. Later, residents Anglicized the Monster name to Munster for their growing village.
Highland and Griffith drew farmers mostly from Holland and Germany. They raised cabbage, onions and tomatoes, some of which they carted into Chicago to sell.
In the 1890s, as much as 100 tons of cabbage a day were sold to Libby McNeil & Co., which had a sauerkraut factory in Highland.
Other industries started showing up in the towns. John D. Rockefeller built an oil pipeline company in Griffith. A brick plant was opened in Munster. The number of residents grew as the plants offered more jobs.
Griffith incorporated as a town in 1904, Munster in 1907 and Highland in 1910. Each had several hundred people.
The growing industry in nearby communities such as Hammond and Gary also drew people to the area. As roads were improved in the early 20th Century, workers from those towns chose to live in Munster, Highland and Griffith.
The populations grew slowly, however, hampered by the Depression and World War II. In the years following the war, each town saw major expansion. Young families from Chicago and the inner suburbs moved to the area for a more rural atmosphere.
The boom lasted for more than three decades. Currently, village officials estimate a population of 20,000 in Munster and 18,000 in Griffith, numbers that are close to the U.S. Census figures for 1980.
Highland has a population of less than 24,000, officials estimate, down about 2,000 residents since the 1980 census.
Town officials say the populations generally have stayed constant or have declined as families get smaller.
“We have added homes to our community, so people aren’t moving out,” Highland’s Wolendowski says.
In fact, many of the families moving in come from the south suburbs just across the Illinois border, lured by the area’s rural nature, family ambiance, more affordable property values and lower property taxes.
“I would say 80 percent of the people looking at our houses here are Illinoisans,” Wolendowski says.
The towns also are drawing home buyers who grew up there as children.
“We’re proud that these people want to raise their families here so they can enjoy the same values their parents had,” Griffith’s Dobosz says. “When things like that happen, that says an awful lot about our towns.”
The three communities have had strong housing markets in the past decade, but now are facing a slowdown because there is limited vacant land left. The towns’ officials are thinking more about redevelopment than new development.
